Of all the lessons to be drawn from Barack Obama’s two presidential campaigns, the most widely accepted may be the one that most flatters romantic notions of electioneering. The legend of how Obama, despite having enough cash not to need much help from volunteers, nonetheless insisted on grooming legions of idealistic supporters for menial tasks has become an object lesson embraced across American politics. “We need to recruit significant local volunteers, rather than shipping in outsiders to do fieldwork,” the Republican National Committee’s postmortem concluded in the wake of Mitt Romney’s 2012 loss. There’s just one problem with the parable of the billion-dollar campaign that relentlessly cadged free labor: Such an approach may never work for Democrats again.

Those best positioned to understand why may not be party strategists but political scientists like David Nickerson. A Yale-trained data wonk just settling in as a junior faculty member at Notre Dame in 2004, Nickerson set out to discover how John Kerry had lost that year’s election to George W. Bush. Plenty of people looking at Kerry’s defeat mused about the candidates’ policy positions or their strategies in the battleground state of Ohio. But Nickerson pursued a more precise theory: He wondered whether a simple tactical choice had made the difference.

Story Continued Below

Democrats had turned heavily to for-hire out-of-state activists and professionally staffed phone banks to deliver their get-out-the-vote reminders rather than the volunteers favored by Bush. But Nickerson, relying on extensive field research from around the country on the relative effectiveness of various GOTV methods, calculated that using unpaid supporters, as opposed to hired call centers, could have accounted for swinging 57,000 votes in Ohio—nearly one-half of the final margin separating the candidates in the state on which the national outcome had depended. “Such strategic decisions can be consequential,” Nickerson understatedly explained in a paper published in 2007. “Past field experiments would suggest that Bush pursued the optimal strategy and Kerry was left at a disadvantage.”

By the time Nickerson published his findings, the nascent Obama campaign—eager to channel surplus enthusiasm among supporters into something beyond votes and donations—had come to its own conclusion about the benefit of tapping volunteers. The campaign resisted the entrepreneurial ward bosses and opportunistic big-city preachers who had long made a habit of selling get-out-the-vote services to needy Democratic presidential campaigns. Instead, Obama’s staff decided to recruit and train locals to form “neighborhood teams.” The campaign rented boutique field offices and paid young staffers to build armies of supporters. Their goal was to ensure—more than ever before—that the people knocking on doors in Tallahassee dorm rooms would be other students; that those dialing voters in the Las Vegas exurbs would come from the same subdivisions as the people they called. The face of the typical volunteer changed too: At least five times as many blacks, for example, told surveyors they were directly working for a candidate or party in the 2008 campaign as in the election four years earlier, and liberal grassroots groups were soon complaining, as Nickerson recalls, “that they couldn’t recruit because Obama sucked up all the volunteers.” While Kerry’s campaign had operated 41 field offices in fiercely contested Ohio in 2004, the Obama team had more than twice that in 2008.